1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of multimedia distribution. More particularly, this invention relates to an apparatus and method for distributing multimedia content and related information using existing network wiring.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the advent of personal video recording on digital media and broadband networks capable of streaming video content, distribution of video in a home is an increasingly important problem to solve. In particular, methods for video distribution must be low cost, convenient to install, and reliable and must also deliver high-quality results. Many digital networking approaches are being used in an attempt to solve this problem.
The home phone networking alliance (“HPNA”) has proposed standards for delivering Internet Protocol (“IP”) data over telephone lines in the home. For video distribution, these solutions typically involve encapsulating MPEG-compressed video into IP packets. Set-top devices connected to TVs then receive the IP data, de-encapsulate the MPEG data, decode the MPEG data into A/V streams and present the stream to the television or other display device. Typically the set top box will also include a graphics processor to present a user interface. A variant of HPNA is HPNA-C in which similar protocols are used, but the home's coaxial wiring is used as a physical media rather than phone lines. Similar digital networks have been proposed to use the home's AC wiring, or wireless digital networks at 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands.
Approaches using phone lines are not ideal for video distribution since most home A/V centers do not have phone lines running to them. AC and wireless distribution systems are of doubtful reliability for time-sensitive streamed media such as audio and video. HPNA-C has the advantage of being based on a medium that is well suited to high-bandwidth signal propagation, but the fact that it is based on digital transmission of the audio and video content leads to the disadvantage of requiring an expensive set top box at the receiving TV to decode the compressed audio and video and present a user interface to interact with the user.
While there are clear advantages to using the home's coax network to distribute video in either digital or analog form, there is one major problem to be overcome for coax to provide reliable communication between any two locations in the home. The home coax network typically consists of cable and splitters that are interconnected and designed to support a broadcast network wherein, as illustrated in FIG. 1, data originates from a root splitter 100 and propagates in one direction through a tree of downstream splitters 102, 104. While it is increasingly common for cable modems to share this coaxial infrastructure to provide signaling back through the root splitter 100 to the cable network 110, it is uncommon for the various nodes 120-123 of the coaxial network to communicate with each other.
One impediment to such communication between nodes within the home is the fact that most splitters 100, 102, 104 are designed to maximize the attenuation of signals between the split legs of the splitter. This attenuation is minimally 25 dB and may be much higher. So, the home coaxial network is well suited for signals passing between the root splitter 100 and the various nodes 120-123 but poorly suited for communicating between the nodes 120-123 themselves since this requires passing signals through paths with high attenuation.
One obvious solution to this problem is to rewire the home to have all of the nodes 120-123 in the home wired directly to a root device which would act as a hub to distribute data to the other nodes in the house. One problem with this approach is that reinstalling the coax in the home is labor-intensive and expensive. Accordingly, what is needed is a system and method which allows nodes within the home coaxial network to communicate with one another in a manner which is compatible with analog transmission of multimedia signals as well as digital. What is also needed is a system and method which can be employed using existing coaxial network configurations.